Improving Parallel Simulation of a GSM Network through Applications-specific Scheduling

Keywords

Abstract

This paper describes a research project where a sequential
GSM network simulator was parallelized in a data-parallel
fashion. Initially, three scheduling algorithms were
implemented to handle the distribution of workunits among
processors. These three algorithms were later redesigned and
implemented by providing the algorithms with application
specific information. By application-specific information we
consider information about the workunits such as
computational requirements of the workunits. The
application-specific information is either given by the user or
extracted from the application during run-time. The
additional information provided to the scheduling algorithms
proved to have a significant impact on their capability to
produce more optimal work balance among the processors.
The results show that workload variation was reduced by up
to 90%.